DESCRIPTION: The principal investigator proposes a five-year projectto investigate the influence of changing social contexts on marriage, childbearing, and contraceptive use. The investigators willcollect and analyze multilevel event history data from arepresentative sample of 150 neighborhoods in the Chitwan Valley of southern Nepal (approximately 5365 individuals aged 15-64). Neighborhood event histories, collected using a combination of survey and ethnographic methods, will provide dynamic measures of community-level changes over time. Together with data from individual- level life histories, these innovative data will provide the means to push analyses of the consequences of contextual changes in directions that have received theoretical consideration but fairly little empirical attention. The research design aims to answer four specific questions: 1)To what extent do changes in the community-level social and institutional context produce changes in family formation processes? 2)Do changes in the family organization of individual life courses transmit these contextual effects? 3) Do any direct effects of contextual change remain onceimportant individual- level experiences are taken into account? and 4) Do the consequencesof community-level changes depend on the cultural context?